PuzzlePhone news, Xmas edition

Dear PuzzlePhone backers and supporters,

The year is going to its end and the new 2017 is approaching. All this year long we had felt your belief in our project and your support, which inspires us to move forward. As J. F. Kennedy once said: “we do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone.”

For PuzzlePhone and its team, the year of 2016 provided challenges and setbacks but also inspiration to progress ahead. We have been updating you earlier that the project have been slowing down its development pace due to delayed payments from EU funds. And that means that, much to our regret, we are not able to keep our promise to deliver the first PuzzlePhones this year. From the bright side, as of now, the situation is cleared with EU, and we have confirmed that we will finally receive funds to continue PuzzlePhone development during 2nd quarter of next year. We also had a chance to raise awareness towards EU of real life startup funding challenges, and we hope our experience will provide insight to EU to improve operational execution of publicly funded projects.

Despite unforeseen circumstances in our plans and available resources, we have been relentlessly progressing.

We had delivered the Piece Maker perk to the fellow backers who want to be at the cutting edge of the PuzzlePhone module development and research.

We have been among dozens participants from all over Europe attending the iEER project kick-off in Brussels in June. This EU funded project aims to boost the collaboration of European actors in order to support young entrepreneurship. It gave Circular Devices the opportunity to pitch and explain both how great and how terrible public funding can be for a StartUp.

Starting in August 2016, Fraunhofer IZM and Circular Devices are creating a learning factory blueprint for UBA, the German Environmental Agency. This “Learning Factory” project, while also aligned with the long-term vision behind the PuzzlePhone and PuzzleLabs, is also supporting the short-term survival of the Company while we workout a private funding round big enough to put things back in track for once and for all.

So yes, currently we are engaged in discussions with investors, and we keep pushing forward with determined resolve and we hope that we can soon come up with positive news.

We are also reading all your comments and emails, and even if we are not answering all of them directly we discuss and comment each and every one of them internally and we wanted to say that we deeply appreciate all the support, but we also understand – and feel the pain of – how annoying and frustrating this delay is.

Thank you all once more for believing in us and supporting us through this tough terrain! Our warmest season’s greetings and best wishes for happiness for the New Year!